


A Name Crossed out in Your History Book

by one_of_those_crushing_scenes, sleepoverwork



Series: MCU Pre-Be-and-Sequels [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon borrowed from 616, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Flashbacks, Odessa - Freeform, POV Natasha Romanov, Pre-Canon, Prequel, What happened in Odessa, background Clint/Laura
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 19:44:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15420225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/one_of_those_crushing_scenes/pseuds/one_of_those_crushing_scenes, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepoverwork/pseuds/sleepoverwork
Summary: About five years before the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Natasha Romanoff finds herself temporarily partnerless, due to Agent Barton taking a few weeks off work after the birth of his (very cute) second child. She’s assigned to extract a nuclear engineer from Iran and bring him to a safe location in Bucharest. Mid-mission, she runs into a familiar face.





	1. Now

**Author's Note:**

> Created for the BuckyNat Mini-Bang 2018. This was so much fun! Can't wait 'til next year ;)
> 
> The title of the fic is taken from the song [Odessa](https://genius.com/Gallows-odessa-lyrics) by Gallows.
> 
> artwork by [sleepoverwork](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepoverwork) also can find them on [tumblr](https://letsallsleepoverwork.tumblr.com)

“So Clint has a sword in each hand,” Natasha says.

Clint, sitting backward in a wooden chair opposite her, puts his face in his hands. “Oh, God.”

“I’m trying to picture that,” Laura says.

“Yeah, well, you can’t use that type of sword one-handed, but he’s trying, for some reason. Wobbling all over the place.” She laughs, remembering how ridiculous it looked.

“To be fair,” Clint points out, “they didn’t cover sword fighting in SHIELD training. I was winging it.”

Natasha ignores him and keeps telling Laura the story. “He loses his balance, falls down, _doesn’t_ let go of the sword. The blade misses his head by, what, a fraction of an inch?” She looks at Clint, who nods, then continues. This is where the story gets good. “Lying on his back, with his left hand, he throws the second sword—with his left hand!—at the boss, and pins him right through the hand into the wall.”

“Ew,” Laura says. “But also, that’s amazing.”

“‘Ew, but also amazing.’ That’s my motto,” Clint quips.

The baby starts to fuss, and without even looking down, Laura unsnaps the top of her henley with one hand and uses the other hand to bring Lila to her breast. The whining sound is quickly replaced by cute little gulping noises, and Laura leans back against the couch.

“Water, hon?” Clint asks, already standing up and on his way to the kitchen.

“Yes, please.” She turns to Natasha and says, “He spoils me. I haven’t gotten off this couch in days. I’m pretty sure my ass print is permanently engraved in the fabric.”

Cooper looks up from his train set. “What’s an ask print?”

“Hey, Coop!” Natasha interrupts quickly. “I don’t recognize that engine, is it new?”

Before her visit, Clint asked her—three times—to make sure to heap lots of attention on Cooper, so that he wouldn’t feel like his place in the family was being displaced by the new baby. As someone who’s never had a place in a family to worry about it being displaced, the concept doesn’t make a lot of sense to Natasha, but she’s nothing if not adept at rolling with the punches. And if distracting Cooper from his mother’s potty mouth is killing two birds with one stone...well, she’s also pretty good at killing, so it works out perfectly.

“It’s from the baby,” Cooper answers, holding it out, and Natasha gets up from the couch and sits down on the carpet to examine it.

Natasha turns the piece over in her hands a few times, ooh-ing and ahh-ing. “This is a quality present,” Natasha says. “What did you get for her?”

“Huh?”

“Well, she got you a train piece, what did you get for her?”

Cooper's eyes go wide. “Daddy! We need to go to the store so I can buy the baby a present!”

“Thanks, Nat,” Clint deadpans, holding Laura's glass of water under the ice dispenser and pressing the button. The ice cubes clink against the sides of the glass as they fall into the water.

Quickly, Natasha taps Cooper on the back of his hand and says, “You don’t need to _buy_ a present. What if you drew her a picture?”

“Of the whole family!” Cooper beams at this idea, then runs over to the chest in the corner of the room to get his crayons and paper. He sits down at a play table next to the chest and starts to color quietly. Meanwhile, Clint walks back into the room with the water, which he hands to Laura before sitting next to her on the other end of the couch, in Natasha’s vacated spot. Laura moves her feet out of the way to allow him to sit, then places them in his lap.

“You two are so domestic,” Natasha says, observing the exchange. “When are you going to start teaching them about subgenic crop modification and homemade explosives?”

“We’ll probably wait until they’ve learned how to read,” Laura says.

Cooper gets up, paper in his hands, and walks over to his mother. “I finished my picture,” he says. He tries to hand it to Lila, who’s still eating, so Laura takes it and holds it up. It looks to Natasha like a picture of four various-sized scarecrows. “It’s our family! Write the names.”

“I’ll write the names, kiddo,” Clint cuts in. “Hand it over.” Laura does, and Clint looks at the paper thoughtfully. Pointing to the largest of the scarecrows, he says, “This one’s you, right?”

Cooper giggles and follows his father to the table, and Natasha takes the opportunity to steal back her seat on the couch.

She looks at Laura. “So, ‘Lila,’ huh? I guess my bribes aren’t paying off.”

Laura looks apologetic. “It was my grandmother’s name.”

“Well, your other grandmother had better stay alive until after Kid #3 is born, if she knows what’s good for her.” It’s a running joke, but it’s not—for most of her life, Natasha never expected anyone to remember her after she died, and the idea that someone might actually carry on her name, that anyone cares about her enough to want to carry on her name, sometimes still feels like a dream.

“Ugh, don’t even talk to me about a third kid right now.”

Clint finishes labeling the picture, and Cooper runs it over to Laura, climbing into her lap. Laura lets out a little _oof_ at being treated like a jungle gym and moves Cooper with her free hand so that he’s sitting in between her and Natasha.

Coop is nestled between her and his mother, carefree and content, and Natasha can’t believe that this is her life. Sometimes she doesn’t understand how they let her in the door and allow her to interact with their children, knowing who she is and what she’s done, how much innocent blood she’s spilled, how much destruction she’s caused.

“Stay still,” Clint says. He walks over to a bookshelf and picks up a point-and-shoot digital camera, then gets in front of the couch, drops to one knee, and points the camera.

“Come on,” Laura protests, “my boob is out!”

Clint laughs. “So is the Virgin Mary’s in at least twenty different paintings. Smile!”

Laura shakes her head, but she smiles, and he snaps the picture.

\--

The chair she’s sitting on is broken. There’s a crack in the plastic of the seat, and she keeps shifting her weight, trying to get the edges to line up, hoping she’s not about to fall on her ass in front of her boss.

Meanwhile, Fury briefs her. “Dr. Ebrahim Shirvani. His day job is professor of particle physics at the University of Tehran, but on the side, he’s an important resource to SHIELD in the field of nuclear engineering. Recently, he’s been a target of multiple assassination attempts.”

“Looks like someone knows what he’s been up to in his spare time,” Natasha mutters. She shifts forward in the chair, shifting a little bit more weight to her feet.

“Exactly.” Nick closes his file and slides it across the desk to her. “Your job is to get this guy out of Tehran and—Romanoff, just move to the other chair already.”

“Sir?”

He sighs. “It’s a budget issue. We can replace it in January. In the meantime...” he waves to the left, and she moves over to the empty seat, where Clint would usually be sitting.

“Barton’s on leave with a broken leg,” Fury says, even though she knows perfectly well that _he_ knows that _she_ knows that he gave Clint a month of paternity leave. Part of the reason he’s so good at his job is that he knows that to keep secrets, he occasionally needs to keep up a front even when it’s not strictly necessary. “I think this works better as a solo operation—it’ll be tougher to make your escape with an entourage. But if you think you need backup, I have no problem reevaluating.”

Flipping through the file, Natasha shakes her head. “No, sir. I can handle this.”

“Good. You’ll need to bring Dr. Shirvani to a safe house in Bucharest, where we’ll bring you home and deliver him to his new life in Cambridge.”

Natasha closes the file and puts it on her lap, ready to leave. “Guess I’d better go brush up on my Persian.” 

Fury stands up and walks around to the front of his desk. “I want to show you something we’ve been working on that should help make your assignment easier. Follow me.”

\--

She can’t understand a thing in this guy’s lecture, and it’s not the language barrier. Advanced physics wasn’t a skill set that the Red Room deemed necessary for their field agents, and with everything that _was_ required of them, there wasn’t much time for electives. Not that it matters, right now. It’s a large lecture hall, and no one is paying any attention to her.

When the class ends, the hall clears, aside from a few students who approach Dr. Shirvani with questions. Natasha stays in her seat, copying everything from the board into her notebook, waiting for the rest of the students to leave.

The students stand in line to ask him questions about the class or about the homework, and the professor answers each of them in turn. The room continues to empty as the students get their answers, when all of a sudden, the student standing closest to him takes a knife out from under his shirt. Natasha stands up, but before she can do anything, he stabs the professor in the belly and then reaches up and slashes his neck. The two remaining students scream, and Natasha runs towards the attacker, who looks up, spots Natasha, and turns to flee.

She jumps onto his back and he falls. Natasha lands on top of him, straddling him from behind, but he bucks her off and pulls himself up to a standing position. Natasha recovers quickly, kneeing him in the groin before he has a chance to get his act together, then pushing him back against a row of desks. He falls and drops his knife, which Natasha kicks out of the way before slamming his head against a desk.

This guy is working for someone, and it frustrates her that she doesn’t know who, but that’s not the mission. Normally, Natasha would be bringing him in for questioning, but she has a job to finish, so she gives him a final blow to the head, carefully calculated to knock him out and leave him dazed for a good week or so.

He sinks to the floor, and she looks up at the remaining students, who are gawking. “Go get help!” she yells, waving them away. They hesitate for a split second and then run outside. The door shuts behind them, and Natasha quickly jams it with a chair.

Once the room is secure, she goes over to the closet and opens it, revealing the real Ebrahim Shirvani, sitting on the floor with a headset on and a laptop computer balanced on his knees. The software on the computer allowed him to remotely control the Life Model Decoy prototype that now lies in the middle of the classroom floor, leaking synthetic blood.

Shirvani looks wan, sweaty—no doubt terrified by the near miss. If she had arrived one day later, if they hadn’t set up the LMD for this class, he would be dead. That type of brush with death can be overwhelming, the first few times. At this point, Natasha is surprised every night when she’s still alive and every morning when she wakes up breathing, but this is only his third assassination attempt survival, so it’s understandable that he’s a little in shock. Still, they need to get moving.

She addresses him in English. “Time to go.” Reaching for Shirvani’s hand, she helps him to his feet, then picks up the computer and headset and shuts the closet door behind them.

Taking a few steps into the room, Shirvani spares a look at the LMD, lying in a puddle of eerily realistic blood. “That’s ghoulish,” he says, but he shakes it off after a moment and starts to head toward the back exit.

“You go first,” she says. “I’ll fix the other door.”

He puts on a hat and scarf as a crude disguise and leaves the back way, while she takes the chair she used to barricade the front door and returns it to its spot before hurrying after him. She grabs the coat that she left at the back of the classroom and puts it on, then quickly removes her reversible headscarf, turns it so that the black side is facing out, and puts it back on her head. Then she catches up with him and they head to her car.

The LMD should buy them some time. She’s not green enough to believe that it’ll get whoever it is who wants Shirvani dead off of their backs forever, but they should have a head start lasting at least until the autopsy. They take turns driving for the 18-hour ride to Batumi so that they don’t need to stop to sleep, and during the periods where they’re both awake, the good professor talks to her a bit about the subject matter from the class she audited, so to speak. By the time they’ve reached the port, Natasha feels like she has a working understanding of particle physics, or at least enough to fake it if she ever needs it for a cover.

On the ferry, they spend most of their time catching up on missed sleep. Natasha wakes up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, and then she decides to go out to the deck and lose herself in the view, the still water stretching forever in every direction, and above her, millions of stars spilled across the dark canopy of night.

“I’m the king of the world,” she mutters to herself.

Shirvani joins her a few minutes later.

“I can’t sleep in a room alone,” he admits. “I keep seeing the shadows move out of the corner of my eye, and I don’t trust that I’ll wake up.”

“And when I'm there?” Natasha says.

“You've kept me alive so far.”

“You seem to have a lot of faith in me,” Natasha says.

“I’ve been involved with SHIELD long enough to recognize competency.” He crosses his arms and looks out at the water. “When they find out I’m alive, they’ll send the Winter Soldier.”

She frowns. “The Winter Soldier is a myth.”

“The only reason he’s a myth is because he doesn’t leave witnesses. He’s as real as you or I.”

Natasha would beg to disagree. No one’s ever seen the Winter Soldier—he’s not really a person so much as a catch-all term for all unsolved assassinations, a ghost story that’s been passed around the agency for decades. There’s no one connecting factor to any of these murders except for the lack of a trail. But she doesn’t believe in fairy tales.

She changes the subject. “What are you going to do in Cambridge? Teach again?”

He shakes his head. “I can’t take a public position. They’ll allow me to continue my research in the university, but my paycheck will be coming from SHIELD.”

“SHIELD paycheck, eh?” She smirks. “Good luck with that. We’ve got the worst bureaucracy known to man.”

They switch cars when they reach land, traveling through Ukraine along the coast of the Black Sea, continuing to switch off turns driving.

She’s the one at the wheel one clear afternoon, driving along the coast about an hour out of Odessa, green expanses of grass on both sides of the road, when suddenly she feels one of the tires going flat. The car starts dragging to the left, and she tries to slow down so that she can pull over, but then she hears the gunshot and a second tire is shot out. She slams on the brakes, but the momentum keeps them moving—the airbags inflate, and the next thing she knows, they’ve gone over the side of a small cliff.

The car lands on the sand, and her face hits the airbag, knocking the wind out of her—which means she survived the fall. The smell of burnt talcum powder fills the air as she catches her breath, taking a look over at Shirvani to see if he’s okay. He’s looking at her in terror, blood trickling from his busted lip.

“It’s him!” he says. “The Winter Soldier. No one else could have caught us.”

Natasha shakes her head. The last thing they need to do right now is panic. “I’m going to check it out. You stay here.”

The hood of the car bursts into flames.

She looks at Shirvani. “New plan: run! Find a tree and hide behind it.”

They push their way through the airbags to get out of the car and start running down the beach. There isn’t any cover over here; they’ll need to climb if they want to get any trees. But whoever shot them...

...Steps out from behind a crevice in the cliff.

“It’s him!” Shirvani repeats.

“Get behind me!” she snaps, moving to cover him. SHIELD needs this guy; otherwise, Nick wouldn’t have sent her. She’s expendable. She’s lived a long life, longer than most people think, and sure, she’s not exactly looking forward to facing her maker—if that’s what happens next—but protecting an innocent...that’s as good a way to go out as any, right?

Natasha positions herself in front of Shirvani, protecting him with her body, and faces the gunman.

She freezes.

She _knows_ this man.


	2. Then

“You’ll be working with a partner for this,” Fennhoff whispered out of the side of his mouth as they approached two men standing in the front hall. “His people have a joint interest in the matter, and they’ve proven to be useful in the past.”

The older of the men appeared to be in his sixties, with grey hair that curled in the front and a haughty expression that indicated that he was used to getting his way. He wore a suit, and despite the conventional businesswear, Natasha could tell from the way his hand lingered around his leg that he had a handgun on his person.

The second man must be her partner, she decided. He was much younger, and he wore a uniform with a leather jacket and only one sleeve—it seemed that one of his arms was a prosthetic, made of plates of metal joined together with some sort of flexible sealant so that it could move organically. The metal arm had a red Soviet star painted on the shoulder like a brand. He had a sharply defined jaw and his features were attractive enough, but put together, something in his appearance was unsettling. It was his eyes, she realized. There was a startling lack of curiosity in them which unnerved her.

“The asset has been briefed in his duty,” the older man, who must have been his handler, said to Fennhoff. He turned to Natasha. “You may find him a bit odd, my dear. There’s no need to fear him; that’s just his way.”

Natasha swallowed and nodded, making sure to stay professional. “Of course.” She hazarded a look at her partner, then asked his handler, “Does he speak?”

The man laughed. “‘Does he speak?’” He turned to ‘the asset’ and addressed him. “Do you speak?”

“Yes, I do,” the younger man responded matter-of-factly, speaking directly to his handler. Natasha thought she detected a hint of an accent. American?

“It’s very nice to meet you,” Natasha said to him. “I’m Natalia.”

He looked at her, finally. “A pleasure.”

She waited for him to introduce himself, and when he didn’t, she shot Fennhoff a curious look. Fennhoff responded with a nod, his face saying, _what can you do?_

Well, this was going to be awkward.

\--

They were dropped off in Aleppo, where they switched into their disguise. They were playing a newlywed couple, so Natasha curled her hair and applied lipstick and put on a dress, making sure that there were no bumps along the leg which would reveal the knife she had strapped to her underneath the skirt. Her American partner, who had looked confused when she’d asked what his name was, underwent a complete transformation, shaving his face smooth and combing his hair down neatly, a hint of wax at the front giving his hair a little bit of a wave. He wore a suit with a gray jacket and a pressed white shirt, his hands covered in fashionable quilted leather gloves, and if Natasha didn’t know any better, she would have imagined another life where she could have married a man who looked just like that.

He acted his part perfectly. On the train to Damascus, despite the fact that no one was looking at them, he leaned in made small talk, complimenting her dress and pointing out bits of scenery, which grew more desert-like and picturesque the further south they traveled. He played the role of ‘newlywed husband’ so convincingly that she started to think that he actually believed that he _was_ her newlywed husband, as if the personality had literally been programmed into him. But that was impossible.

They checked into the hotel in Damascus bright and early in the morning and prepared for the assignment. The job was simple—a certain government clerk was in possession of some information that Leviathan, as well as her partner’s nameless agency, didn’t want uncovered. It happened to be that he was attending a conference taking place in this hotel and was planning on presenting this information to his superiors over the course of the event. The clerk needed to be eliminated, obviously, and the paper trail would need to be cleared too.

Everything went exactly as planned. The members of the conference took a break for lunch, and, disguised as a cleaner, Natasha had no problem getting into the empty conference room, finding the man’s briefcase, and removing the relevant files. She brought them to the balcony of their room and set them on fire, burning a cigarette at the same time to cover the smell. Meanwhile, her partner was stationed as a waiter in the hotel’s restaurant, and he successfully slipped a slow-acting agent into the mark’s drink.

Back in their honeymooners disguise, they took a short walk and then sat and chatted in the lobby to ensure that they would hear about it when the job was completed. Sure enough, about an hour and a half after lunch, screams started to come from one of the conference rooms. The front desk employees ran to check, then returned a minute later to call an ambulance and report a heart attack. All of the hotel guests gathered to watch the scene, Natasha and her partner just faces in the crowd. By the time the ambulance arrived, the man was dead.

One more notch on the belt.

She was no novice when it came to killing, but still, it always hit her hard after taking a life. The thoughts intruded—was he married? Did he have a sweetheart, children, a pet, parents who loved him? An unfinished novel, perhaps?

The ambulance left, the crowd dispersed, and Natasha headed straight for the bar.

“Where are we going, darling?” her partner asked, catching up.

“I need a drink,” she said.

He looked at her as if he was trying to figure out what on Earth could be bothering her, which made her growl in frustration and yank him over to the bar. Why did they have to partner her up with a damn robot?

Four glasses of wine later, she wasn’t feeling any better at all. In fact, she wasn’t feeling much of anything, including her legs. “This wine is bullshit,” she declared to the room, though since she said it in Russian, she doubted anyone understood. Turning to her partner, who hadn’t ordered anything for himself, she said, “Help me back to the room.”

Obediently—obligingly, even—he held out his arm, and she leaned all her weight on him and started walking toward the elevator. Once they were on their floor, in the empty hallway, she started to speak again. “I’m so lucky.” He didn’t answer, so she kept going. “I could have been a nobody, you know? If I’d been born someone else, I could have been some nobody village girl who spent her whole life within ten kilometers of the place she was born.”

They reached their room, and he opened the door, letting her go through first. Natasha let go of his arm and walked into the room, continuing her speech. “Would never have traveled the world and seen all the amazing sights it has to offer. Never felt a man’s last breath under my hands as I choke the life out of him, never seen the light go out in a person’s eyes while they look at me in fear. How lucky am I?”

She dared a look at him, hoping against all hope to see some sort of human reaction in his face, but it was as blank as ever.

“What’s _wrong_ with you?” she demanded, raising her voice. “Why can’t you just act like a person?”

“What would you like me to do?” he asked. Completely tone-deaf. Like a computer, spitting out pre-programmed sentences. She screamed in frustration, not caring who heard her in the other rooms. When she was done, he was still sitting there, still with that damned compliant look on his face.

“Never mind,” she groaned, pulling a pillow on top of her head.

She had a splitting headache the next morning, of course. And that was before the red-hot embarrassment that came along with the memories of her outburst the night before. The one good thing about his strange demeanor was that he didn’t treat her any differently afterward, but it didn’t prevent her from feeling self-conscious.

After checking out of the hotel, they took the train back to Aleppo and took a cab to the safe house, a detached house made of stone, with a large courtyard and four rooms inside. Their extract team was supposed to meet them there, but they hadn’t shown up yet. This wasn’t something to worry about—delays weren’t uncommon from either side of a meetup, and she could take care of herself while she waited. Taking care of her American sidekick was another story, however. Ever since the mission had ended, he’d seemed lost, directionless. Last night, it had made her angry, but today, with a clear mind, she was worried. The Red Room and Leviathan certainly weren’t the warmest of homes, but at least her thoughts had always been her own. More and more, she was starting to suspect that her partner’s behavior was something that had purposefully been induced in him by his handlers.

He did okay with simple instructions. When she told him to look for linens, when she asked him to make the beds in two of the bedrooms, he was able to complete the tasks. “Thank you,” she said, and he looked at her as if the phrase was almost familiar to him.

The team didn’t show up that day, nor did it arrive during the night. The next morning, Natasha woke up early and decided that she would spend the day out and about in the city. There was no reason not to take advantage of an extra day of freedom, after all. She knocked on her partner’s door and opened the door to tell him about her plans.

He jumped, seeing her. “Who are you?” he asked, startled. “Where am I?”

This was new. She made her voice even, calmly reminding him of the mission they’d just completed. “We’re in Aleppo now,” she said. “Our contacts are running late.”

He stared for a few seconds, and then it seemed to click for him. The lines on his forehead softened and his body relaxed. “Oh. Right.”

“Uh.” She blinked and shook her head to clear her mind. “Since we have some free time on our hands, I was going to go out and explore the city a little bit.” She paused. “Do you want to join me?”

He gave her a puzzled look. “Why?”

\--

They spent the better part of the morning in the Public Park, walking along the paths, admiring the landscaping and watching the people around them. It was nice, for a change, to be in a crowd of people, and to not be charged with killing any of them.

Lunch was street food, shawarma wrapped up in flatbread. Later, while walking through the arched alleyways of the Al-Madina souq, Natasha found herself in front of the entrance to the soap market. A seller stood next to shelves with blocks upon blocks of soap, and Natasha felt drawn to them, with their crisp, slightly spicy bay scent. The luxury of fancy soaps wasn’t one given to her back home, but surely she could squeeze this into her stipend.

Her partner tilted his head at her as she made the transaction, a curious expression on his face. She tried to ignore it, watching the seller wrap up her soap, bringing the package to her face for one last inhale before putting it away in her handbag.

“Do your employers not provide you with soap?” he asked as they left the stand.

It was very, very hard for her to avoid rolling her eyes. “There’s a difference between the soap they stock and _this_.” He still looked confused, so she sighed and opened her handbag. “Here.” She unwrapped a corner of the soap and put it under his nose. “Smell it.”

Tentatively, he took a whiff. 

He stopped walking and grabbed her hand before she could take it away, then smelled the soap a second time. At Natasha’s look, he quickly dropped her hand and started to walk again. “It’s fine,” he said.

She almost laughed.

Natasha spoiled herself that night, taking a bath with her new soap. She ran the block of soap up and down her body, pressing hard to massage her tired muscles. When she came out of the bath, her skin was soft and pink, and she felt much better than she'd had in ages. After drying herself off and getting into pajamas, she stretched out in her bed and sank into a deep sleep.

She was surprised when she woke up the next day and they were still alone. Her partner was already eating when she made it to the kitchen, digging with gusto into the hummus they’d brought home the day before.

“This is so good,” he gushed, mouth full of food.

The pita he was using to shovel hummus into his mouth was at least fifteen hours old, so it couldn’t have been _that_ good, but more importantly, the enthusiasm with which he spoke and ate made him seem like a completely different person.

“You have to try some,” he added, ripping off a piece of his pita and holding it out to her. She allowed a hint of a smile to show on her face as she sat down across from him, dipping the offered bread into the hummus and taking a bite.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” he said, eyes lit up like a child’s.

Natasha laughed despite herself. “You want wonderful?”

They went out again that day, this time focusing on sweets. They gorged themselves on harisa, a semolina cake drenched in syrup, and kanafeh, a pudding-type dessert with sweet creamy cheese and topped with shredded kadaif dough, and more cookies in a day than Natasha had ever eaten in a week. Since he couldn’t remove his gloves in public, she had to feed him the food directly, making Natasha laugh every time she accidentally got cheese or jam on his nose. It was ridiculous and surreal, but she hadn’t had this much fun in years.

They returned to the still-empty safe house in the late afternoon, sated and sticky.

“You’re acting different,” Natasha said as she turned on the sink to wash her hands. “I like it.”

He nodded. “I’ve been awake too long.”

She shut the faucet and wiped her hands off on a dish towel hanging over the sink. “What does that mean?”

“When I’m not in use, my handlers keep me asleep.”

She was shocked. “They do _what_?”

“Well, not really asleep,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s a cryogenic tube which keeps me in stasis. When I wake up, I have no memories of past missions, unless I’ve been awake for too long, and the memories start to return. Keeping me asleep like that prevents me from aging, so they can get more use out of me.” He kept saying these things like they were normal, as if this wasn’t outrageous. They kept him _asleep_ whenever he wasn’t working a mission? And Natasha had thought _her_ life was heavily controlled.

“Keeps you from aging?” she repeated. “So how old are you, really?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea.”

He put his gloved hand—the right one, the flesh one—on the counter next to hers, fingers nearly touching. She looked him over, examining the lines of his face. He looked to be in his late twenties, but depending on how long he’d been doing this type of work, he could have been born hundreds of years ago. _God, imagine what that kind of existence must do to the soul._ And yet, when he was like this...

He didn’t look like his soul was broken. He looked like a man who had finally carved out a few hours of freedom—freedom of the soul, something even more precious than what she’d felt yesterday morning—and he wanted to savor every minute of it.

Natasha brought her hand to his face, trailing her fingers down the side of his cheek. “You never...make your own choices?”

He turned his face towards her hand so that her fingers traced the corner of his mouth. “Never.”

She moved her fingers to his lips, which were softer and warmer than they had any right to be. “Would you like to?” She pulled her hand away, feeling a buzzing under her skin, in her blood, knowing how crucial it was to wait for his answer.

Standing so close she could almost hear his pounding heart, feel the heat coming off his skin. He looked at her, eyes half-lidded, pupils dilated. When he spoke, his voice was husky. “I would like that very much.”

They moved at the same time, his hands around the back of his neck and hers into his hair, bringing their mouths together. It was intense, almost violent. She’d been with men before, but always as a strategic move—never just because she wanted to. It had never felt like this, with some animalistic urge inside of her trying to claw its way out, knowing that she needed this more than she needed her next breath of air. Clothing flew all over the room in their haste to strip down, and as they rocked their bodies together, Natasha felt free in a way she never had before.

Afterward, they held each other in bed as the sun set and the day turned to twilight. The sweat evaporated from their skin, cooling them off. “I’ve never done anything so impulsive,” she admitted, lying in his arms.

“Me neither,” he said. “At least, not as far as I know.”

She felt a pang of sorrow and took his hand in hers. They stayed like that for a little while, in comfortable silence, until he spoke again. “Maybe they’re not coming for us.”

She laughed. “You think they just forgot we existed?”

“Well, we could run away. Disappear.”

“That’d be nice.” He didn’t say anything, and she pulled away to look at his face, realizing it wasn’t just banter. “You’re serious.” She’d never considered leaving Leviathan. Where would she go? What else would she do? She didn’t know anyone in the entire world outside of the institutions that had raised her and made her into who she was.

She’d never seen his face as animated as it was now. “We’re the two most suited people for it in the world,” he said. “If we wanted to get lost, we could do it so they’d never find us. Spain. Brazil. Canada. Find an empty hill, pitch a tent, buy some sheep. Reinvent ourselves. It’s a big world out there.”

She thought about it, trying to imagine herself living in a tent on a hill. “I’ve reinvented myself hundreds of times, but never for more than a mission’s span.” The image faded from her mind as reality set in. “I’ve never been anyone but Natalia Romanova, Red Room student, Leviathan agent.”

“You could be anyone,” he insisted.

“So could you.” She paused, wondering something. “Did you use to be someone else?”

“I don’t know. My memories don’t go back that far. For all I know, I was born in that cryogenic tube.”

She didn’t believe that. “They never told me your name.”

He shrugged, his eyes lowered. “They never told me, either.”

“You have an accent,” she told him. “American.”

“Really?” He sounded surprised.

“You didn’t know?”

“I never thought about it. I’m usually not awake long enough to think about that sort of thing.” This time, speaking about the way his handlers used him, he was wistful.

Natasha ran her fingers through his hair. “You should have a name.”

He smiled, leaning in for a kiss which left her breathless. “Okay,” he said. “Give me a name.”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

“In the meantime...” He grinned and moved over her, starting to kiss his way down her body.

Eventually, they fell asleep, naked and entangled in each other’s bodies, moonlight shining in through the open window, as they dreamed of different possibilities.

Early in the morning, just as the first cracks of sunlight started to make their way into the room, there was a knock on the door. Natasha’s eyes flew open, meeting her partner’s panicked look, and the two of them turned their faces towards the open window. As Natasha wondered whether they had time to make a run for it, the door opened. His handler from earlier stood at the door.

At least ten agents filed in, two in Leviathan uniforms, the rest apparently belonging to her partner’s mystery organization. Behind them was some sort of transparent casket on wheels, with complicated-looking machinery inside. Her eyes darted back and forth between her partner and the box as she realized instantaneously what the purpose of the casket was.

“I apologize for the delay,” his handler said. “It was unavoidable.” About the fact that they were in bed together, he said nothing.

Four agents went for her partner, and he threw two of them across the room, but the third one zapped him with a cattle prod and took advantage of his temporary disorientation to slap a pair of thick metal shackles on him. Once he was restrained, his handler approached, holding a hypodermic needle filled with a clear fluid.

“No, please,” he begged. “Don’t put me back—” He turned to her, frantic. “Natalia, don’t let them—please, _kill me_!”

As he said the words, his handler pushed the needle into his neck, injecting him with the liquid inside. “Kill me,” he repeated weakly, just before his eyes rolled back in his head and he sank into the arms of the two men holding him. They struggled under his weight, but a few more agents darted in to help.

“Stop!” Natasha said. “What are you doing?”

One of her colleagues from Leviathan leaned in and said, “It’s no use, Widow. They have their ways.” She whirled on him angrily, but he was right. Every single one of them was armed, and she had nothing but her fighting skills, which wouldn’t be enough to take them all down.

The men managed to pick him up and get him into the box, and then his handler nodded at Natasha. “Good work, Black Widow. We appreciate your organization’s cooperation.”

The team left, without a further word or even a look. Natasha was left behind with two Leviathan agents, trying to get a handle on what had just happened. The cryogenic freeze—he’d told her about it, but seeing it with her own eyes was an entirely different story. _Kill me_ , he’d said.

 _When I wake up, I have no memories of past missions_ , he’d said.

One night, that’s what they’d had together. They took him away, they were going to wipe his mind, erase the entire encounter from his memories, turn him back into a mindless weapon. He’d wanted to die rather than go back to that existence, and there was nothing she could do, not one of her against so many armed agents.

Furiously, she wiped her hand across her face, willing herself to hold back the tears. Crying wouldn’t bring him back; it would just make her look compromised. Realizing that her agents were waiting for her, she snapped, “Turn your pervert eyes away from me while I get dressed.”


	3. Now

She hasn’t seen him since that morning all those years ago. 

Oh, she tried. But no matter how many offices she sneaked into, no matter how many filing cabinets she unlocked and folders she went through, she found nothing. It was like every trace of him, and whatever organization he worked for, had been wiped clean.

And now, here he is, in front of her, pointing a KS-23 at her. He has a mask over the bottom half of his face, and his hair is long now, but the eyes are the same, and the arm is a dead giveaway. And the only thought running through her mind is that she wishes she knew his name; she’s _sure_ that if she knew his name, if she called out to him with his name, he would know her, and he would stop.

She doesn’t have time for a second thought, as pain explodes in her side.

Oh God, he did it; he shot her. Her hand instinctively goes to the wound, to staunch the bleeding, but why would he shoot her there, instead of in the head, where it would be more likely to—

Oh. Oh, no.

She turns around, knowing and dreading what she’ll find. Shirvani is down on the ground, bleeding out of his head. She brings her other hand to her back and feels the blood, sticky and warm, from the exit wound. Her hands start to shake, and she holds them out in front of her, showing him her bloody palms. He doesn’t move; doesn’t seem to react.

“Меня ты тоже собираешься убить?” she asks, trying to keep her voice steady. _Aren’t you going to kill me, too?_

The mask he wears doesn’t leave much room for expression, but his eyebrows draw together and his eyes squint a little in confusion. From his perspective, there’s no reason for her to be speaking in Russian. Those bastards, they’ve wiped the memory of her from his mind the same way they wiped away his humanity. And she didn’t stop them.

He answers her.

“Ты не моя миссия.” _You’re not my mission._

She’s holding a weapon, she realizes. It’s pointed at him, and all she needs to do is pull the trigger to eliminate the threat. And—and to put him out of his misery. He asked her to do that, a long time ago, and she’d let him down, but now she has the opportunity to make up for— 

A crack of gunfire, and she turns her head to see, but he was just trying to distract her, which she realizes a split second too late. By the time she turns back, he’s gone.

She rushes over to Shirvani, gets on her knees and takes his limp hand in hers, leaning down with her ear above his mouth as she checks for a pulse in his wrist. No signs of life; nothing.

She failed, and how. Shirvani is dead after she promised to protect him. She feels weak, ashamed. She’s _never_ frozen in the middle of a mission before. Never frozen unintentionally in any sort of combat since she was eight years old. But this was him, her nameless soldier who wanted to run away with her to Spain and become a shepherd. He’s alive, but not really. Imprisoned inside his own mind, if the version of him that she got to know over those few days still exists anywhere inside of him. She got out of the Red Room, out of Leviathan, gets to choose her own destiny, but she wasn’t able to save him.

The pain in her abdomen, from the gunshot wound, starts to nag at her, and she realizes that she needs to act fast. She’s in the middle of nowhere, with no car, and if she doesn’t treat this wound soon, it may actually become fatal.

While she strips out of her clothing and heads for the water, she devises a plan. She’ll hitch a ride back to Odessa and find a car there, then meet the team in Bucharest and give them a report. It’s bad news, but sometimes a mission goes bad, and she did the best she could.

She doesn’t want to think about the mission anymore. All she wants to think about is getting into the water and cleaning the blood off of her skin and off of her hands. The water is cold, which she’s grateful for, as the shock of it takes her mind off of everything else. She immerses up to her neck, scrubbing her hands together and watching the blood stain the water red, then dissipate.

She manages to find some seaweed, which she turns first to put pressure on the wounds and then to dress them, and then she puts her clothing back on without waiting for her skin to dry. Before heading back to the road, she hesitates and takes a last look at Shirvani’s body, wanting to dig a grave for him, hating the idea of leaving him there the way she would have done in the past, but knowing that the longer she goes without treatment, the more dangerous her wound will become.

SHIELD can always come back for him, she reminds herself. She’ll tell them where. This particular stretch of road isn’t something she’s likely to forget anytime soon.

When she arrives in Bucharest, she goes to the safe house at the address Fury gave her. A tall agent with a pretty face, introducing himself as Grant Ward, greets her, takes one look at her face, and calls for a medic.

“What happened?” Ward asks, sitting by her side as their colleagues stitch her up.

Natasha grabs onto the leg of his chair and exhales forcefully as the needle pierces her skin. Between the second and third stitches, she answers, “The Winter Soldier.”

Ward makes a surprised face. “I always thought the Winter Soldier was a myth.”

\--

She gets a week of leave to recover, and she heads straight to the farm, stopping only at Toys R Us on the way. When she reaches on the doorstep, an oversized stuffed animal in each hand, the door opens before she even gets a chance to knock.

“You know you don’t have to bring a present every time you visit,” Clint says, amused. Then he sees the look on her face. “What’s wrong?”

Before Natasha can answer, Cooper runs up from behind him, eyes wide open. “Is that for me?” he asks, pointing to the stuffed animals.

Natasha holds them both out to him and tells him to choose one for himself and the other for Lila. He chooses the panda for himself, leaving his sister a stuffed dog bigger than she is, and Natasha follows the Barton boys into the house.

“Is this a tea problem or a vodka problem?” Clint asks in an undertone, making sure that Cooper doesn’t overhear.

“Tea, please.” She’s already dangling over the edge and doesn’t want to see what she’ll turn into if alcohol is added to the picture.

“Coming right up.”

Laura’s sitting on the couch again (Natasha has to wonder if she’s gotten off the couch since the last time she saw her, or if her words about staying on the couch for days were meant to have been taken literally), with no baby in sight. “Lila’s napping,” she explains, indicating the baby monitor on the side table. “How was your mission?”

“I can’t talk about it,” Natasha says simply. She wants to, though. She’s never told anyone about her American, and she’s not sure that she can bring herself to talk about him, but she doesn’t want to keep it all inside anymore. She loved him, even if she doesn’t exactly know what love is, and she failed him, and she lost him.

“That bad?” Laura asks.

Natasha hesitates, then nods, feeling a lump start to form in her throat.

“Oh, sweetie. Come here.” She opens her arms, and Natasha curls up on the couch, clutching Lila’s stuffed dog close, and lays her head in Laura’s lap.


End file.
